My first read: If a president commits crimes unrelated to him being the most powerful person in the world, he can be prosecuted. But if explicitly uses his powers to commit crimes, he is at least presumptively, and probably absolutely immune from prosecution.
I mean, holy shit.
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Reposted by Sean Carroll
On the nature of LLMs: @fchollet.bsky.social discusses AI with @seanmcarroll.bsky.social in the latest episode of Mindscape: www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024...
Podcast profile: truesciphi.org/podcast-prof...
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Since Trump is a convicted felon and spent the whole debate fabricating falsehoods and is an autocratic insurrectionist, it’s time to think about who the Republican convention should replace him with once he’s forced to withdraw. Romney, maybe?
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It’s not really testing psychology, of course.
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This is why the ARC challenge won’t reveal the problems publicly, if I understand correctly. And LLMs do much worse on it than humans.
arcprize.org
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Bonus interloper. Never know what you’ll encounter on the mean streets of central Baltimore.
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#Caturday theme: catching rays.
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Good: in that mode where you're so engrossed in the paper you're writing that you dream about it all night.
Bad: waking self not nearly as clever as dream self.
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I think you did well!
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By means of a comical witticism
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I was surprised at first, because thermodynamically, the brain is incredibly efficient- it produces much less waste heat per computation than a computer. But if you’re talking chemicals, then sure.
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Being poor is a trap that is very hard to escape, and giving people a bit of money can make all the difference.
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And the real problem with the PSR has (basically) nothing to do with randomness from quantum mechanics. It's just that attaching unique "reasons" to events isn't how fundamental physics really works.
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Originally wrote "or so I argue...", but honestly this is a fairly casual examination rather than a careful argument, so caveat lector.
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The Principle of Sufficient Reason says that there is a reason for everything that happens. Does physics somehow provide support for this idea? Not really! Or so I suggest in this short paper.
philarchive.org/rec/CARPAT-30
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Among other things, Francois is the author of "On the Meaning of Intelligence," and co-creator of the ARC Challenge to test for true artificial intelligence.
arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
arcprize.org/blog/launch
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Mindscape 280 | François Chollet @fchollet.bsky.social on Deep Learning and the Meaning of Intelligence. An important conversation to be having, I think. #MindscapePodcast
www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024...
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Democritus stretching through time to look over my shoulder and ask whether I really need another book on information theory instead of reading the ones I have.
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Nope. Just means we have some science to do, as usual.
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Nothing very profound to conclude, just some thoughts I scribbled down for a great workshop on the philosophy of thermodynamics organized by @wmyrvold.bsky.social this week.
It would be great to better understand how Nature actually does search through the space of complex systems!
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So for strands longer than 181 base pairs, there is not enough time or matter in the universe to search through all the possibilities. And the human genome has 3 billion. So the search that Nature has actually done is very sparse indeed.
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Since it's a thought experiment, imagine that each strand runs through possible combinations at a billion per second, searching for the fittest one. (Not realistic!) In that case, the whole universe can search all of the genomes of length N as large as ... 181.
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Thought experiment: take all of the protons & neutrons in the observable universe, put them in the form of DNA nucleotides, collected into strands of length N. Then imagine the universe searches through all possible combinations. How many can be searched in the age of the universe?
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One thing about complex systems is: the space of possibilities is mind-bogglingly large. Consider DNA. The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs. How well has evolution searched through all the possible genomes to find the fittest ones?
Not very well at all. 🧵
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Basically the plot of Marvel’s Civil War!
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Reposted by Sean Carroll
Congratulations to SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang for winning the 2024 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
santafe.edu/news-center/news/ted-chiang-receives-2024-penmalamud-award
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Being an "evangelical Christian" in the US has become a predominantly cultural/political signifier, disconnected from church attendance or religious doctrine.
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Reposted by Sean Carroll
My book about the end of the universe inspired an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds! 🖖😃🚀 screenrant.com/star-trek-st... (hat tip to @seanmcarroll.bsky.social, whose research paper I was quoting in the book)
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Ellen is a pioneer in the psychology of mindfulness. Her recent book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health.
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705365...
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Mindscape 279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body. #MindscapePodcast
www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024...
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Do people appreciate that, if they like democracy and also seek social change, the job is to persuade people who disagree with them?
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Reposted by Sean Carroll
"The new anti-university rhetoric . . . is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values." 1/3
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...
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Reposted by Sean Carroll
I made this Pride flag using only NASA images and our team thought it would be cool to share on social (I work on the NASA heliophysics communications team), but it's getting all sorts of hate on the bird app and Fbook. Thought y'all might be more appreciative of it here. ☺️🏳️🌈💖
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